Renovated Dutch Museum Reaps Popular Fame

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The recently renovated Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague.CreditRonald Tilleman/Mauritshuis

By Nina Siegal

Sept. 9, 2014

THE HAGUE — A small painting of a little bird chained to its feed box used to hang in the staircase gallery of the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery here, drawing occasional old master aficionados up the stairs to catch it in a glimmer of sunlight.

That painting, “The Goldfinch,” by Carel Fabritius in 1654, now takes pride of place in a gallery in the upstairs chambers of the recently renovated museum, between two windows, in the room before the Vermeers.

Following the worldwide success of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, “The Goldfinch” has become a star attraction for the museum, whose visitor numbers have increased threefold since it reopened in June.

“The ‘Goldfinch’ effect for us has been the idea that people are going in search of the real thing,” said the museum’s director, Emilie Gordenker, who oversaw the $40.6 million renovation and expansion of the Mauritshuis this year.

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"The Goldfinch," by Carel Fabritius in 1654, has become a star attraction at the Mauritshuis following the worldwide success of Donna Tartt's novel of the same name.CreditIvo Hoekstra/Mauritshuis, The Hague

This is the second time in recent years that the Mauritshuis — a relatively small museum with just 800 works — has grappled with popular fame for a part of its collection.

The museum got a huge boost in 1999 after Tracy Chevalier’s novel “Girl With a Pearl Earring” described an imagined love story behind one of the other masterpieces of the collection, the Johannes Vermeer painting of the same name.

The novel, and the 2003 film starring a young Scarlett Johansson that was adapted from it, raised awareness of the work and spurred visitors to make pilgrimages to The Hague to see it.

When one of your works is plucked from relative obscurity and catapulted into popular culture, “you have two choices: to ignore it, or use it as a hook to get people interested in the collection,” Ms. Gordenker said.

Eight years ago, the Mauritshuis made “Girl With a Pearl Earring” central to its marketing campaign, hanging a banner of the “Girl” on the outside of the building; it was taken down during the recent renovation. The museum’s current campaign focuses on the idea that the “Girl” has come home to its own museum. To highlight the homecoming, the museum has now asked lovers of the painting to submit images of their reproductions of the “Girl” in the context of their own homes. The museum has promised that the winner’s home will be reconstructed inside the museum around the original Vermeer. The Mauritshuis has posted a video on YouTube to give a sense of how this will work.

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Johannes Vermeer's "Girl With a Pearl Earring," also in the Mauritshuis collection. Visitor numbers soared after the success of the novel in 1999 and movie in 2003 of the same name.CreditIvo Hoekstra/Mauritshuis, The Hague

For the moment, the museum has not planned any additional marketing for “The Goldfinch,” other than moving it to a better location. Ms. Gordenker said she was making hanging decisions for the collection just as Ms. Tartt’s novel was becoming a best-seller. At about the same time, the Mauritshuis was attracting a new measure of celebrity as highlights of the collection were on display at the Frick Collection in New York for a special traveling exhibition.

“It was a pure coincidence, and I think it was a surprise to Donna Tartt, too,” Ms. Gordenker said. “We’re delighted with this. But we realized, particularly after the show at the Frick, that we ran the risk of getting large crowds.”

In its new space, the painting has “more room to breathe,” she said.

The idea that people would travel to a relatively obscure place to lay eyes on a work of art that figures in another work of art is not entirely new — to the Mauritshuis, or to any museum.

For many years, Ms. Gordenker said, French visitors have come to the Mauritshuis searching for “the little patch of wall” in Vermeer’s “View of Delft” that inspired such breathless admiration in an elderly writer named Bergotte, who figured prominently in the fifth volume of Marcel Proust’s novel “Remembrance of Things Past.”

And throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the star attraction of the collection was “The Young Bull,” a 1647 painting of a bull with a farmer, cow, and sheep, by Paulus Potter. Long before Vermeer was a household name, this portrait was considered a great achievement in naturalistic paintings of daily life. But, as Ms. Gordenker points out, it was probably best known for another literary reason: The farmer from the scene was used on a popular children’s alphabet teaching tool.

“The message is very clear,” she said. “The more people become familiar with something, either through a film or through a novel, the more the actual painting really speaks to them.”

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the director of the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery. She is Emilie Gordenker, not Gordencker.